The field of the present invention relates generally to a printing system with control area network (CAN) devices and subsystems, and more particularly to intelligent nodes that provide common software and hardware interfaces for such devices and subsystems.
Current designs of printing systems may incorporate modules, such as microcontrollers, to control, monitor, and/or provide other functionality to the printing systems. These modules allow the printing systems to have extensible printer configurations. The function of a module is determined by the program code that is programmed into the module. Such program code programmed into a module is known as firmware. In the past, it was necessary to remove the module from the system and either replace it with a new module containing the modified program code, or re-program the module with the modified program code and replace it into the system. This was an expensive and time consuming process, especially in large systems that include multiple modules. More recently, it has become feasible to program or re-program modules that are installed in systems without removing the modules from the systems. Each module is individually programmed with its own firmware.
Some existing related systems employ a Controller Area Network (CAN) or control area network (CAN) communication standard to couple the modules into a network. In CAN networked and extensible printer configurations an auto-configuration process determine what modules exist, how many, and in what order. Each module is then assigned a unique bus identifier (CAN-ID) by a central controller board for conducting communication between the modules. However, CAN network protocol does not provide association information to help determine which sub-boards belong to which module. In fact, in CAN network protocol sub-boards are treated as modules and are assigned a CAN-id. This treatment of sub-boards as modules causes the Main Controller to be involved with sub-boards that require very low-level control and would be better suited for localized control
For the reasons stated above, and for other reasons stated below which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the present specification, there is a need in the art for printing systems with extensible configurations to dynamically accept boards and to facilitate inter-module communication.